Who’s Afraid of Theory?

In a pique of indignation, the editors of the journal Philosophy and Literature ran a “Bad Writing Contest” from 1995 to 1998 to highlight jargony excess among the professoriate. Inaugurated during the seventh inning of the Theory Wars, Philosophy and Literature placed themselves firmly amongst the classicists, despairing at the influence of various critical “isms.” For the final year that the contest ran, the “winner” was Judith Butler, then a Berkeley philosophy professor and author of the classic work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. The selection which caused such tsuris was from the journal Diacritics, a labyrinthine sentence where Butler opines that the “move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brough the question of temporality into the thinking of structure,” and so on. If the editors’ purpose was to mock Latinate diction, then the “Bad Writing Contest” successfully made Butler the target of sarcastic opprobrium, with editorial pages using the incident as another volley against “fashionable nonsense” (as Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont called it) supposedly reigning ascendant from Berkeley to Cambridge.

The Theory Wars, that is the administrative argument over which various strains of 20th-century continental European thought should play in the research and teaching of the humanities, has never exactly gone away, even while departments shutter and university work is farmed out to poorly-paid contingent faculty. Today you’re just as likely to see aspersions on the use of critical theory appear in fevered, paranoid Internet threads warning about “Cultural Marxism” as you are on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, even while at many schools literature requirements are being cut, so as to make the whole debate feel more like a Civil War reenactment than the Battle of Gettysburg. In another sense, however, and Butler’s partisans seem to have very much won the argument from the ‘80s and ‘90s—as sociologically inflected Theory-terms from “intersectionality” to “privilege” have migrated from Diacritics to Twitter (though often as critical malapropism)—ensuring that this war of attrition isn’t headed to armistice anytime soon.   

So, what exactly is “Theory?” For scientists, a “theory” is a model based on empirical observation that is used to make predictions about natural phenomenon; for explains the history (or “genealogy,” as they might say) of one strain of critical theory in his excellent describing how a century ago an influential group of German Marxist social scientists, including , , , and , developed a trenchant vocabulary for “what they called the culture industry,” so as to explore “a new relationship between culture and politics.” At the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, a new critical apparatus was developed for the dizzying complexity of industrial capitalism, and so words like “reify” and “commodity fetish” (as well as that old Hegelian chestnut “dialectical”) became humanistic bywords.